Sergio and I start at 5 in the morning and we work until 11. Then we have a 2-hr. lunch break and start again at 1 pm. Today we finished the afternoon milking around 4:30. The morning milking takes longer because that's when we treat all of the hospital cows with their medicine. My first day was Tuesday and I only worked the morning shift, but Sergio and I found a routine pretty quickly. We start by bringing the newly freshened cows (the ones that had calves overnight) into the milking barn and we milk them for the colostrum. Then we bring the rest of the recently freshened cows in. We treat all the fresh cows with a little oxytocin. Once they go out into the milking string they don't get it anymore.
After the fresh cows are milked we bring the show cows up and milk them, followed by some fresh cows that had complications and aren't ready to be back in the milking pens. This usually goes pretty quickly. What takes the most time is the hospital pen because we have to go through and make sure that every cow gets treated with the right medicine. We also test milk for antibiotic residue before they go back out into the pens. It was really hot out here on Tuesday: over 100 degrees and humid, which is somewhat unusual for this area. Either way it was hot! Today was over 100 degrees, too, but not as humid so it wasn't so bad. The cows, however, are feeling the heat and it's affecting their intake and production levels. When it's hot out, they don't eat as much and then they start to lose weight and things go downhill from there. Thankfully we have a great team of people working in the feed area to figure out how to help the cows. Next week the weather will be in the 80s and that will be a welcome relief.
Anyway, back to what we do in the hospital barn. In the past 2 days I've successfully given several IVs to cows, armed a cow (for the first time!), given lots of shots, been kicked at (thankfully the cows have had bad aim), and become fairly efficient at putting milking machines on. I'm learning a lot and I'm loving it!
Brenda and I went to the Stanislaus County Library in Turlock tonight. Last week we went and got our library cards but we could only check out three books each because we needed proof of address. Well, the only mail we had both gotten was packages in cardboard boxes. The ladies at the desk laughed so hard when we handed them the front of the boxes. "In 10 years of working here, I've never been handed that before," one of them said. They thought it was hilarious that we had brought in pieces of cardboard boxes instead of mail. We informed them that neither of us had been here long enough to be getting regular mail. In reality, we used the mailing addresses of our dairies since neither of us actually lives in a place with a street address. We both live on our dairies so that's what we used. It was funny and Brenda and I are pretty sure that they thought we were sisters. But hey, that's fine with me. It was a good time in the library : )
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